Teachability

 As we prepare for the new year of the Book of Life programme this week, the gospel of today draws our minds to one of the core principles of COLW: teachability. 

"Learn from me," says Jesus, "for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

The command to learn from Him - to be teachable always in His presence - is of course essential. He is our teacher, the captain of our souls, the one who brings us out of that darkness in which we fail to know God. The God whom we discover in Jesus is a gentle presence and even - to the wonder of St Paul, as we know - humble, humbling himself even to accept the death of the Cross for our sake. 

There are two ways of being like God: the way of the tempter ("You will be like gods"), sometimes called the 'ape of God', through which we make idols of our desires and satisfactions. In contrast, there is also the way of Jesus who tells us to be as perfect as the Heavenly Father is perfect (i.e. "Be like God"). Yet in giving us this command He is not inviting us to grasp a forbidden fruit that does not belong to us, as if we could be as perfect as God. Rather, He is inviting us to be as perfect as our created being allows us to be: to fill our minds with truth and our wills with love, for knowing truth and loving good are the first things that make us like God. In fact, through the grace of Christ, knowing the truth of God and loving Him bring us into communion with the Holy Trinity.  Being like God is not self glorification but a path of obedience to the truth established by our Creator, especially the truth that He has desired to share His life with us. 

So, in this sense, we learn from Him who is gentle and humble of heart. But note also the end result of that learning process: you will find rest for your souls. In reality, when we begin to know God, we can begin to know ourselves. False beliefs about ourselves can even impede our knowledge of Him. All the great saints of the mystical path have known this truth. Humility is the result of knowing ourselves - our worth and indeed our limitations. And in that humility, we find that we lose the tension which sin and ignorance bring into our inner selves. We make ourselves weary by pursuing ourselves. We must learn instead to let God refresh us by bringing us to a greater knowledge and love of the truth: the truth about Him and the truth of who He made us to be.

Together, both these paths - the path to self knowledge and to knowledge of God - are summed up in COLW by the idea of teachability or docibilitas to use the Latin word. Jesus, help us to open up our hearts to you, to learn who you are, to learn from you who the Father and the Holy Spirit are, and to see ourselves and all humans in the light of the truth that you have revealed to us.